Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Who'd A Thunk It!

By Cernig

Over at the Corner, they're citing praise for Jonah Goldberg's paean to black helicopter paranoia, "Liberal Fascism". They're having to dig pretty deep.

Charles Murray declares: “‘It is my argument that American liberalism is a totalitarian political religion,’ Jonah Goldberg writes near the beginning of Liberal Fascism. My first reaction was that he is engaging in partisan hyperbole. That turned out to be wrong. Liberal Fascism is nothing less than a portrait of 20th-century political history as seen through a new prism. It will affect the way I think about that history—and about the trajectory of today’s politics—forever after.”

Charles Murray - fellow at the neoconservative mothership, the American Enterprise Institute - and author of The Bell Curve, with it's claims that Black people are genetically intellectually inferior to white people - is endorsing Jonah's nonsense. Who'd a thunk it? I bet the quote above is a blurb on the bookcover.

[A] damning omission is the absence of any serious care, detail, and attention being devoted to Nixon, Watergate, the plumbers, the "Saturday Night Massacre," a far darker trauma for the nation than the Monica Lewinsky follies. Goldberg's lame explanation? "As for why I didn't spend a lot of time on the fascinating case of Richard Nixon, or (say) Truman and Eisenhower, the answer is simple: I told the story I thought needed to be told."

True, I suppose. If you're doing a deliberate smear job, you don't want the tar brush to wander.

...Liberal Fascism is such a transparently sloppy, shifty, intellectually rinky-dink endeavor that a show of anger would be a larger expenditure of emotion than a book this second-rate deserves.